Discover the real techniques, ingredients and stories behind the Italian dishes you know and love—and the ones you've yet to try—with more than 145 delicious recipes that bring simplicity back to Italian cooking, from the James Beard Award-winning team at Milk Street.

Forget everything you thought you knew about Italian food. In Italy, cooks throw away their garlic, they don't stir their polenta and they never labor over pans of risotto. But they do make enormous meatballs that are tender and light, and they occasionally break all the rules when making pasta.

We have have spent years scouring small eateries, local markets, farms and home kitchens from Lombardy to Calabria and from Sardinia to Sicily in search of fresh takes on classic recipes, as well as little-known regional favorites that never crossed the Atlantic.

On our travels, we found new ways with pasta, from perfect cacio e pepe in Rome to Puglia's olive oil-crisped fettuccine with chickpeas and a lemony pesto from Amalfi, where the pasta itself is enriched with citrus. Plus, some surprising tomato sauces, including spaghetti all'assassina from Bari—spicy, charred and made in one skillet.

We visited a Neapolitan trattoria where five sisters serenade diners with opera and serve an eggplant Parmesan that's rich, but never fried. In Northern Italy, we made meatball-like bread dumplings simmered in chicken broth. And in Sardinia, a hearty herb soup studded with pancetta, beans and tiny nuggets of pasta.

“Milk Street Backroads Italy” gives you a seat at the table with Italian cooks sharing the food they love, handed down from generation to generation.